Many individuals with severe hearing loss may not be able to communicate effectively over standard voice grade telephone lines using conventional telephones. Since the 1960's, devices have been available making communication between hearing impaired individuals possible.
These devices, known as TDD's or Telephone Devices for the Deal operate by having a hearing impaired individual type into a keyboard the message to be sent to the other hearing impaired party. The TDD is capable of generating a coded signal which is transmitted via modem over telephone wires to the other similarly equipped device which then receives, decodes and displays the message on a visual and/or printed display. This procedure is repeated between the individuals until the communication is completed. The process described is entirely manual and nonverbal in nature and is considerably slower and more cumbersome than conventional verbal telephone usage.
The specialized TDD equipment, while having come down substantially in price over the years is still costly in comparison to basic voice grade telephone receivers and not readily available commercially as this product has been primarily marketed to deaf individuals who as a group represent less than 0.5% of the total American population.
In recent years, especially following the enactment into law of the `Americans with Disabilities Act`, efforts have been made to provide and standardize the methodology allowing hearing impaired individuals equipped with TDD equipment to communicate telephonically with normal hearing individuals not equipped with a TDD device. To effectuate this capability, RELAYS centers have been established by major telephone carriers (like AT&T, Sprint,MCI, etc). A RELAY center provides trained operators equipped to receive telephone calls from either the heating impaired using TDD's or from those with normal hearing calling in on standard telephone equipment. The RELAY operator's function is to dial the desired party and serve as a go-between the heating and hearing impaired parties. In the typical situation, the TDD equipped individual keystrokes the sending message to the RELAY operator who then voices this message to the hearing party who listens to the RELAY operator on their telephone handset as they would in a normal phone call. In reply, the hearing party voices the content of their message to the RELAY operator who provides real, time speech to text captioning for the hearing impaired by keying the voiced communication into equipment capable of transmitting coded signals to the TDD user. The TDD decodes the message, making it available to the hearing impaired user via a visual display device or paper tape printer. This process is repeated until the conversation is completed.
The initial concept of the RELAY system was designed to provide TDD equipped deaf individuals access to the hearing world. For the most part this arrangement has worked well in part because the deaf population has traditionally relied on nonverbal means of communication and has used the keyboarded based TDD for over 30 years as a means of communication telephonically. The RELAY has opened up new telephonic opportunities to this population without any necessity to modify their basic typed text to text communication format.
Important to the development of this invention has been the recent introduction into the RELAY system of the capability of providing a voice bridge, known as `Voice Carrier Over` or VCO which allows the hearing impaired with speech faculties to speak directly to the hearing party. In the typical case, a TDD equipped individual dial up the RELAY service and indicates to the RELAY operator via keyed in instructions that they desire this call to be a VCO call. Once the RELAY operator sets up the proper equipment settings on their computer terminal, the hearing impaired party is instructed to begin speaking into their telephone handset. At this point the RELAY operator listens to the hearing impaired caller instead of watching for TDD originated text transmission. The RELAY operator then dials the third party hearing individual and explains the VCO operating protocols. In practice, a VCO calls works the same way as a traditional RELAY call except that the heating impaired speaks rather than keystrokes to the other party. Upon instruction the RELAY operator manually flips a switch allowing the voice bridge to be established. Once the hearing impaired has finished their segment of conversation (normally done by saying the words `Go Ahead`) the RELAY operator closes the voice bridge and resets the control equipment to begin transmitting coded signals to the TDD user representing the speech to text captioning of the hearing persons segment of the conversation.
While not all deaf individuals have adequate speech skills for this VCO, this arrangement provides a more natural, spontaneous and direct method of communicating and relieves the RELAY agent of the necessity of actively participating in what was formerly the text to speech aspect of the role as a go-between between the two parties. VCO is now a standard feature in the RELAY system throughout the United States and in other countries around the world.
Voice Carrier Over capability in the RELAY system is a critical innovation for many reasons. In the past, TDD usage was essentially restricted to deaf individuals, their friends and family's and various government and business organizations. The RELAY added tremendous opportunities for deaf individuals to communicate with the `outside` hearing world. In this role the RELAY provides a valuable service for those people already equipped with TDD equipment to communicate outside the small circle of other TDD users.
With the advent of VCO, the potential exists for the RELAY to make communications capabilities accessible to a much larger potential segment of the population representing those individuals who while they are hearing impaired are not deaf. This population has grown up in the `normal` hearing world and for the most part have lost their heating later in life after having developed speech and cultural patterns significantly different from individuals who are deaf.
In America, there are over 21 million individuals classified as hearing impaired. Of this group less than one million are classified as deaf. There exists an additional four to six million people whose residual hearing loss is severe enough to make conventional telephone communication (even with amplification) impossible. Hearing impairment is often a progressive disability. Usually it develops slowly affecting people later in life long after adequate speech skills have been acquired. Most severely hearing impaired have excellent speaking voices . . . the problem is that they simply cannot hear well enough to communicate effectively over regular telephone equipment. Because many hearing impaired individuals grow up in a hearing environment they have little identification or participation in the deaf cultural world and rarely learn nonverbal forms of communication such as sign language nor have they seen or used TDD equipment as a means of telephonic communication.
Very often hearing impaired, specifically those who cannot utilize normal telephone service are senior citizens with other disabilities such reduced visual, mental and mobility faculties. These individuals have great difficulty in adapting to and utilizing the conventional TDD because essentially the TDD is a modem based typewriter with a display. Because the TDD was designed to be used as a communication typewriter it has no self contained audio input (except for the use of a telephone handset), utilizes a small display screen that is horizontally mounted on the top of the TDD and requires many cumbersome programming routines (hitting various keys in specific sequence or in various combinations) which must be learned in order to dial up the RELAY service, retrieve messages, and for other functions. Most significantly, TDD's are very expensive, at present the least expensive costing in excess of $200 a retail. Quite often these factors represent obstacles, especially for older hearing impaired individuals and have served to discourage TDD distribution and usage outside of the deaf community.
In an effort to broaden the appeal of TDD's newer models have recently been introduced incorporating streamlined cabinet design attempting to make the TDD look more like a conventional telephone. These changes have lowered costs somewhat but have done little to improve the TDD's keyboard based operating characteristics and inherent design limitations.
Due to the complexity and expense of keyboard based TDD's little effort has been made to market the conventional TDD to the larger group of hearing impaired but non-deaf individuals, especially senior citizens. This seems strange because it is precisely this population of hearing impaired that could benefit the most from the VCO service now routinely provided by the RELAY service. Since one must be equipped with a TDD (or modem equipped personal computer) to access the RELAY very few nondeafened hearing impaired individuals are able to utilize the RELAY service and are therefore effectively denied access to telephonic communication. This is specifically in contradiction with Federal law--Title IV of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
The present invention was developed to try to overcome the design limitations of the conventional TDD with the specific purpose of making available to the hearing impaired with speech capabilities a low cost, self contained telephonic interface device requiring no programming for operation, no telephone hookup for audio transmission and a display screen assembly which can be seen comfortably at any viewing angle. This device would be a dedicated instrument whose sole function is to dial into and receive transmission from the RELAY utilizing voice bridge technology and differs significantly both in design and operation from all TDD devices now currently available.